‘There must be incentives to attract best brains to teaching’
How would you react to the crisis in the education sector particularly the issue of quality of teachers?The crisis in teacher education relates to the quality of teachers and quality of learning and the output of the students in schools. It is also the issue of relevance, whether the teacher education programme used is relevant […]
How would you react to the crisis in the education sector particularly the issue of quality of teachers?
The crisis in teacher education relates to the quality of teachers and quality of learning and the output of the students in schools. It is also the issue of relevance, whether the teacher education programme used is relevant to the purpose for which it is designed. When I assumed office in 2007, one of the striking things I came across was the disconnect between teacher education programme and the basic education programme. The colleges of education are supposed to produce teachers that will serve the basic education sector whereas the training programme in the colleges is based largely on secondary education curriculum. The basic education curriculum which is revised in 2007 recognises poor level of basic education, early childhood care, primary education, junior secondary education and adult and non-formal education.
Now the training of NCE teachers is based on the curriculum of lower secondary education and if you train teachers on a particular curriculum you expect them to able to deliver that curriculum effectively. By the way, we have a paradox, the training is based on the lower secondary curriculum whereas the products of the colleges are employed to teach at the basic education level, so there is a disconnect between the training programme of teachers and the curriculum that they are supposed to deliver after training.
The first thing I did was to address this issue of relevance and quality so that we make teacher education relevant to the sector. In 2007 the NCE minimum standards with the new basic education curriculum harmonization was introduced by the Nigerian Research and Education Development Council (NREDC), and to do that means to bring elements of basic education and mainstream them with basic teacher education curriculum so that students that are undergoing training will be made familiar with some rudiments of basic education curriculum that they are supposed to deliver after training.
We achieved that by 2008 and we disseminated it to colleges of education as the fourth edition of the NCE minimum standards. From that we also took a broad decision to restructure the curriculum to address the basic teacher needs and we needed to reform our teachers’ education to make it more relevant and more qualitative. Relevant in the sense that we now need to train teachers based on levels rather than on subjects. So instead of continuing with the two subject combination, subject based curriculum and NCE programme, we now introduced levels specific NCE programmes, so you can now go to our colleges of education and enroll for an NCE early childhood and care education programme or NCE primary education study or NCE adult and non-formal education programme. And we have also added special education as a special focus because we have teeming Nigerian young children that are challenged and they require special needs education teachers.
Apart from the review of the curriculum, we also introduced new quality assurance system, previously colleges of education will have to wait every five years before accreditation, but since 2012 when we introduced a new quality assurance system, they can do their own self institutional assessment and determine what their strength and weaknesses are on various programmes and do something on them even before external creditors come. Each college now has quality assurance unit with the staff trained on the quality assurance system through support from the DFID. So we have moved from the old accreditation system which is just about external accreditation to new system which now combines both external and internal self institutional assessment.
How will the best minds be attracted to colleges of education?
One of the reasons our students are looked down upon is because when it comes to setting up cut-off points for admission into the various tertiary institutions in Nigeria, we always opted for lower cut off point than that for universities. Where there is lower cut off point, whatever the reason, you have given room for institutions that have higher cut off point to think that those of you that are in the colleges are inferior to them.
We approached JAMB which came out with a Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations where all students can sit for the same exams. Previously there were different examinations for university, colleges and polytechnic students, but now they all sit for the same exams, though we still have to grabble with the cut off mark because even now colleges insist that if you raise the stakes, they may not get the students because whoever has five credits and 200 plus points will just opt for university rather than colleges of education or polytechnic. So that is the first thing we did. We hope that through our reform and refocusing of colleges on their mandates to produce teachers for basic education, we will be able to attract better brains in the colleges of education.
Another aspect of the strategies that we have adopted is by encouraging colleges to also offer degree programmes alongside the NCE so students that are attracted to degree programme, and to my pleasant surprise, during the last JAMB policy meeting the statistics provided by JAMB showed that colleges of education have taken the lead from polytechnics as second option after university. This is a good sign that more students are now opting to train to become teachers.
But I think largely if you want to attract best brains to teaching there must be incentives that will come from employers of teachers. So I think states can go a long way in that direction by putting incentives alongside training for teachers. In 2006 during the broader education reform, the minister then came with the idea for housing scheme for all teachers but it didn’t come to finishing because the minister didn’t stay long in office. Scholarship should also be provided by states for those who want to do NCE or BSc at the university. Such things will attract good brains into teaching as they did in decades back.
NCE has been the minimum teaching qualification since the 80s yet more than 40 per cent of our teachers do not have it, why?
To be precise, the final decision about the minimum teaching qualification was taken in 2006 by the National Council on Education, December 2006 was giving as a final date for tolerating any person who does not possess the NCE in basic education schools, but we still have many particularly in the northern part of the country. We have this kind of scenario simply because states have failed to abide by the decision they took collectively at the National Council on Education to raise the minimum teaching education to NCE and to make the December 2006 the final.
The reform for pre-service training was introduced by you, what are the reforms?
From 2006 when NCE became minimum teaching qualification, we needed to review our curriculum to address the added responsibility for the NCE teachers because the abrogation of the Grade II Certificate means anybody teaching in any school in the country must possess the minimum teaching qualification which is NCE. If you want to do that effectively and efficiently you must review your curriculum, you must make it comprehensive as to cover all aspects of basic education. Basic education has four major component, early childhood and care, primary education, junior secondary, adult and non formal and all of these four levels require teachers. So the training has to be level specific not subject. So for each side you need to have a specific segment of teachers or programme that will address.
How far has the NCCE gone in implementing the reform?
We are lucky that just about the time the new programme will take effect, the DFID pledged support for us for the roll out of the new teachers’ education reform in the colleges of education and we have a teacher development programme which is founded by the DFID and it is a six years programme. They are supposed to be operating in the six states of Katsina, Jigawa, Kano, Zamfara, Kaduna and Niger. Currently we are at the first phase of the programme and so we are operating in only three states Jigawa, Katsina and Zamfara. So we are working with the colleges with the support of the DFID in order to implement the new teachers education reform in the colleges and this has worked very well for us.
The teacher’s salary scheme is another disturbing issue in the country, what challenges is the issue facing?
The TSS, Teacher’s Salary Scale, has been a very contentious issue right from the days of the broader education sector reform. I worked on the team, transformation task force for teachers quality. There were agitations from the teachers particularly from the NUT that they needed the implementation of the Teachers’ Salary Scale which was adopted also by the National Council of Education back then but the implementation has become so problematic and we did an analysis at the time to see how many states in the federation can afford the payment of the teacher’s salary scale and to our surprise only three states in the South- South could afford to do that with their monthly take home from the federal revenue, even Lagos that has very high IGR could not afford to pay the Teacher’s Salary Scale.